


Girl In The Mask: A D&D Fiction Collection

by swordnspell



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:42:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29511972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swordnspell/pseuds/swordnspell
Summary: A collection of self-indulgent short works inspired by my Dungeons & Dragons characters and campaigns. No particular plot. Length and style of each piece varies. Updated whenever I feel inspired."Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth." - Oscar Wilde





	1. A Winter Full Moon [Kevahir]

**Author's Note:**

> Liege Kevahir Tallurion was once an eladrin. A ward of the Nightmare Court, they were slowly corrupted by the world of faeries until they became one themselves. Now, 3,000 years later, Keva is a powerful archfey staring down the barrel of eternity without the mortal friends they knew in their youth.

The woods sleep in darkness. Silver pillars of moonlight peer through the gnarled branches; where the light touches, the thick snow glitters blue-white. Your boots punch through the snow’s frozen top. You look up, and your breath rises in a column of steam, but the stars hanging delicately in the ink-black void of space seem clearer and crisper than usual.

You gasp and scramble back as your boot finds the first mirror-flat step of an icy lake. The ice threatens you with an audible snap, but does not crack. Underneath, you can see whorls of water, black as pitch, against the bottom of the ice. Only a hand’s depth separates you from the water’s cold grasp.

Reaching into your pack, you pull forth a sword. The whole weapon is black, even the blade, and it exudes ancient power. You’ve kept it wrapped in layers of cloth and fur, but even still the metal of its hilt is painfully cold on your skin. You fling the sword onto the ice.

The metal sings as it skids along the surface of the pond. The sword spins slightly on its cross-guard, then stops. Your breath spills from your lips like smoke. All around you, the woods wait with you. Doubt slithers in your chest and throat, then coils and sits heavy as a stone. Give it one more moment, you tell yourself. A beat passes, then another.

The ice snaps, once. You suck in air, barely a gasp.

Cracks spiderweb around the sword, then radiate outward to the edges of the pond. Black water gushes through the seams and bubbles as if in a heated cauldron. Small waves arch and freeze in the shape of gnarled hands around the floe carrying the sword, and then the floe shatters, crushed into pieces, and the hands take it down into the depths with their frozen claws. A moment of animal fear pierces your heart. What have you done? You ask yourself, followed by, Is it too late to run?

Black fog billows from the hole in the center of the pond, sweeping out across the ice. Then, a shadow rises from the fog and coalesces into a tall, slender humanoid form. One thin hand holds the black sword; its fingers are stained with frostbite at the tips, fading into skin colored the cold blue of ageless glaciers. More and more of the shadowed fog forms into tangible skin and clothes, until before you on the ice stands a person.

Their hair is long and blue, a sheet of ice against the deeper blue of their skin; their eyes are inverted, with sclera as dark as the shadows from which they emerged and snow-white irises glowing in the night. A pair of icicle antlers, frozen and jagged, springs from their head.

“I’ve been asleep a long time,” the faerie muses, absently swinging their old sword to get a feel for its weight. “Who wakes me from my slumber?”


	2. Horse Heist [Nico & Colleano]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nicodemus Campana is a tiefling cavalier, a mercenary who just wants to earn some coin and care for his bedridden mother. Enter Colleano the Splendiferous, another tiefling, but different in every possible way -- a flashy, hot-tempered sorcerer with a flair for the dramatic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally written as a commission for a dear friend, Colleano's player. Thank you for your generosity.

The mercenaries had no time to count their reward before Lord Mateo's butler shooed them out the door. Nico realized, then, they'd been shorted.

The other mercenary took longer to reach the same conclusion. “Well, couldn’t even give us a proper good-bye! What do you think that was-- Oh, he scammed us.”

Nico’s companion was a tiefling like him, but the similarities ended there. Nico was all muscle and callouses. The other was a carefully-manicured, whip-thin reed of a man. They’d completed the mission together, but Nico never cared to learn his coworkers’ names.

“This is unbelievable. You know, I planned on celebrating with vodka and now I can’t because it’s  _ ruined-- _ ”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” Nico said.

The other stared in scandalized silence.

“ _ NI _ -co! It’s me! Colleano!” Sighing theatrically, he paused and added, “Hey, um. I’m sorry about your horse.”

Nico didn’t want to think about his horse. After she fell in combat, he’d needed the reward to cover both the cost of a new mount and his mother’s tinctures.

Colleano perked up. With a wicked grin, he took Nico by the shoulders and whirled him around. “Do you see that?”

Across the estate, behind a row of shrubs, sat a stable.

“Let’s make up for the amount he shorted us. It’s only fair,” Colleano drawled.

Nico tensed. “My credibility--”

“All this about your credibility, blah, blah, blah. What about the  _ lord’s  _ credibility?” The mage put an arm around Nico. “Listen, Nico, let’s get you a damn horse.”

Sneaking into the stable sounded simple in theory. In practice, a stablehand caught them immediately.

“Let’s talk about this,” Colleano began, but the boy ran screaming from the stable. “Okay, uhh. Nico, what now?”

But Nico’s attention was on the massive white draft horse at the end of the row. Leaning her head over her stall door, the horse sniffed Nico’s outstretched hand. She pressed her nose sweetly into his palm.

“Oh, how sweet, I knew you’d find--  _ Can you please hurry up _ ?” In the distance, guards ran towards the stable. Colleano began unlatching all the horses’ stalls in a panic.

Nico pressed against the wall as horses fled past him. “This is your plan?”

“Look, it was this or light everything on fire!”

Some guards broke off to chase the scattering horses, but most focused on the mission at hand. Heaving his shield up with one arm, Nico met a guard’s sword. Colleano shrieked and crouched behind him.

A thunderous slam tore their attention from the fight. The white horse kicked her stall door off its hinges and charged into the fray. She reared up, and the guards fell back to shield their faces.

Nico took the opportunity to fling himself onto the horse’s back and pull Colleano behind him. Leaped over the hedges, the horse galloped at full speed down the cobblestone drive. The guards faded out of view behind them.

Soon, they veered onto a little-traveled side path in dense woods and slowed to a trot.

“I can’t believe that worked!” Colleano laughed. “Now, about her name. I have some ideas. Well, just one, really…”

Nico sighed and shook his head. He smiled.


	3. Rooftop Fight [Orienne & Magda]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Orienne, an aasimar bounty hunter trapped in a deal with the undead, has her work cut out from her when the shadar-kai Magda shows up ready for a fight.

Orienne woke to the sound of city bells. One, two, three, four, five, six gongs. The dim red-pink glow shimmering through the slats of the shutters told her she’d slept the daylight away -- a regular occurrence for her. Bounty hunters generally worked best at night.

Her client, a wealthy lord, put her up in a better inn than usual. Orienne took her time enjoying the hot water in the bath, then braided her wet hair back into a long braid over one shoulder.

Underclothes, clothes, armor. Orienne paused for a moment as she pulled one of her boots over the skull-shaped scar permanently branded into her ankle. After all this time, she always took a moment to look. It was meditative. It anchored her.  _ No going back now. Use what you’ve done to move forward _ .

Orienne’s armor was her trademark. Everyone who knew anything about bounty hunters knew her by her armor -- the matte black, the metallic gold accents. And, of course, her eyes, but by the time her targets saw the flecks of divine gold in her teal eyes, it was too late.

Tall, thin, with a deceptively innocent face, Orienne knew she was difficult to miss, so instead of being stealthy she did the best thing any bounty hunter could do. She shot first from a distance. Walking out of her room and into the last fading rays of sunlight, Orienne put out one hand and summoned the shadowy form of a black and gold crossbow.

Her prey tonight was some sad sack of an academic. As far as Orienne could tell, the man had done nothing wrong and was no physical threat to anybody, but his research put him on the brink of discovering something the people in charge wanted to keep quiet.  _ And that’s where I come in, _ Orienne thought to herself with a passing sense of annoyance.

She took backroads and rooftops, carefully picking her way to the university where the kid had huddled himself up in the library. She’d watched him for a few days now, coming and going in the streets around the university so nobody would think her out of place. He liked a bakery across the street that served coffee she didn’t hate. He also lived in a shitty apartment nearby that he frequented so rarely he may as well have been paying rent for a storage shed. Orienne knew for sure the kid would still be huddled over some ancient dusty tome with his shoulders tensed up to his earlobes.

Knowing this, she took her time finding her way up to a point where she could see through the academic’s favorite window. This was the true challenge; the university adopted the severe, sloping points of old temple windows, with the panes of glass stained and organized into patterns and images. They were lovely, sure, but the effect made it difficult for Orienne to spot her target and aim.

Then, there -- the refracting glow of a candle flame through a shard of magenta stained glass. Orienne positioned herself behind a steepled rooftop, hefted her crossbow over her shoulder, and aimed. Directly in the path of her bolt, she glimpsed a silhouette through the window, backlit by the candle.

The crossbow was knocked out of her hand and impaled, fixed to the rooftop shingles by the point of a spiked chain.

Orienne swore. “Oh, motherfucker--”

She dismissed the crossbow and rolled backwards just as the chain came unfixed and whirled towards her face. Before she could roll right off the roof, Orienne caught herself on the gutter. Another woman stood above her, one foot planted at the top of the steeple to steady herself and clad from head to toe in studded black leather.

“Not you again,” Orienne grumbled, summoning her crossbow back into her hand.

The woman, a sleek corpse-gray elf with wild white hair, smiled coyly. “I missed you too, honey.”

“I’m a bit busy right now.”

“Too bad,” the elf said before whipping the chain towards her once again.

Orienne pushed off her back foot and hopped out of the way just as the spikes shredded a few shingles right off the roof. She landed and bounced to the side, just barely clearing the gap between the building and the top of the university library.

The elf teleported effortlessly across the gap. On the other side, she seemed immaterial, her body wispy and transparent. Orienne fired a bolt and it passed through, barely affecting her.

The other woman clicked her tongue. “Is that any way to greet me after all this time? Aren’t you glad I’m okay?”

“Honestly?” Orienne reloaded her crossbow. “I’m kinda mad. I thought I got you last time.”

“That’s the fun part! You did! Got me real good, right in the rib cage. Nasty shit.”

Orienne aimed, a second too late. The chain looped around her waist and dragged her face to face with the elf. This close, she could see her reflection in the woman’s fully black eyes. Her breath, warm, fanned out across Orienne’s face.

“So it’s true, then,” Orienne said. 

“It’s probably just better if you believe everything people say about us.” The woman winked.

Orienne grabbed a dagger off her thigh and pressed the cold metal to her attacker’s throat just as she regained corporeality. A beat passed.

“Go ahead,” the woman said, smiling. “I’ll be back.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Usually we don’t fuck with warlocks. Somebody else’s business, y’know. But in this case,” she reached up and slipped a gloved hand around Orienne’s wrist, “you got your powers from a Bonelord. That doesn’t sit right with us.”

“I was a dumb kid,” Orienne said, softly.

The slightest of movements pinged Orienne’s attention. She dismissed the crossbow, forfeited the dagger to the woman’s grasp, and slipped out through the coils of the spiked chain just as the woman yanked it. The razorblades just barely scraped across the skin of her face, leaving a clean cut along the cheek.

Orienne flipped over the edge of the roof, grabbed the gutter with her fingertips, and flung herself through the stained glass window. Several of the students in the library screamed as she rolled across the broken glass. The elf woman followed soon after. Her boots crunched across the shards.

She paused as Orienne, still prone, summoned the crossbow pointed at her face.

“Are you trapped in this pact against your will?” The woman asked.

For a moment, Orienne hesitated. The honest answer was “yes,” and the woman’s neutral tone held a hint of compassion.

“That’s none of your damn business,” Orienne said.

“Shame.”

She dodged Orienne’s crossbow bolt and let loose the spiked chain once more; Orienne grabbed it. Ignoring the blood pouring between her fingers, she pulled the woman close against her.

“Close your eyes if you know what’s good for you,” Orienne told her, then exploded in a burning ball of radiant light.

The light poured out of her eyes and mouth, filling the library to the corners. She could hear the clatter of students who had been hiding fleeing from the room. The woman stumbled back, blinded, and Orienne shot her with the crossbow, the bolt now glowing with searing light. Reload, shot, reload, shot.

Eventually the light sputtered and died. Both of them fell to their knees.

Bleeding from several wounds and rubbing her streaming eyes, the elf woman laughed, a shallow laugh suggesting it hurt to breathe. “Damn, you’re good. An aasimar in a deal with the undead? Really?

“I told you,” Orienne said. “I was a dumb kid trying to be edgy and rebellious without thinking about the consequences.”

“Magda.”

Orienne blinked in confusion before she realized it was the woman’s name. “Orienne.”

“Um, excuse me.”

Both women looked to the side where a golden-eyed man with a shock of white hair stood, clutching a star atlas to his chest. Orienne’s target.

Suddenly, a black portal crackled open, spiralling out of shadows. Both Orienne and the new guy leapt back.

“That’s my ride,” Magda told them with a grin and a wink. “I’ll see you around, Orienne.”

She disappeared into it and the portal snapped shut behind her.

“Anyway, what I was going to say is this is a library,” the academic said. “I don’t think you’re really… supposed to do… this.”

Orienne should have shot him on the spot, but didn’t have the strength to muster her crossbow. She laughed incredulously. “You’re lucky, kid.”

“And you’re the hunter who’s been tailing me for a week.”

He smiled wryly. Orienne raised her eyebrows, impressed.


End file.
